The Coronavirus Thread

[Sean Hayden]

Why the United States declined to use the WHO test, even temporarily as a bridge until the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention could produce its own test, remains a perplexing question and the key to the Trump administration’s failure to provide enough tests to identify the coronavirus infections before they could be passed on, according to POLITICO interviews with dozens of viral-disease experts, former officials and some officials within the administration’s health agencies.

I should have known politics was behind this mess. They're telling people that they could have stopped the spread if they had the test. It doesn't seem to matter that they've failed to stop the spread in other countries who had the test and have been testing like mad.

It will be interesting to see when the dust settles how much good "drive-thru" testing did to limit the impact of the virus.

[NineBerry]

It's not a question of the virus spreading or not spreading but the speed it spreads.

[Sean Hayden]

That makes sense. So, how much faster has it spread here vs there vs anywhere, testing drive-thru style vs waiting for symptoms?

[Sean Hayden]

Did Italy receive kits from the WHO, and was the spread there slower?

[NineBerry]

Watch the stats here over the next few days. https://www.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboar ... 7b48e9ecf6

The US has been quite far down until two days ago and now nearly caught up with Germany within 48 hours.

Experts on the TV said, Italy was very unlucky because the virus arrived there very early directly from China and without being detected.

[Sean Hayden]

Thanks 9. It will be interesting to see. Obviously previous outbreaks have given experts confidence that testing early and often helps prevent the spread. It really shouldn't irk me so, but it does. I wanna argue with it!

[Tero]

US cases
2020-03-08 ​​ 495 (+143) (+41%)
2020-03-09 ​​ 643 (+148) (+29%)
2020-03-10 ​​ 932 (+289) (+44%)
2020-03-11 ​​ 1,203 (+271) (+29%)
2020-03-12 ​​ 1,561 (+358) (+30%)

[pErvinalia]

It's hard not to see the US getting particularly hammered by this, what with their lack of UHC and working conditions like sick leave. And not to mention Trump fucking things up from his end. Man I hope he gets the virus and carks it.

[Tero]

Medications require testing. No country is approving any new tretment in weeks unlesss it is approved for another virus.

Test kids are another matter. No need to delay. FDA is too fussy.

The next hurdle was getting the test approved for use. It can take a year-and-a-half to submit the necessary documents to South Korea's authorities and get it approved.

This time, it took a week.

Lee Dae-hoon, who led the team of scientists working to develop the coronavirus test kit, has spent his whole life working on diseases. He's never seen the KCDC approve a test kit so fast. On February 12, Seegene got sign off, thanks to KCDC expediting the process. It was only then that the scientists only knew for certain that their test worked, as the government had evaluated the test using their own patient samples.

Seegene is one of four domestic companies providing coronavirus test kits in South Korea. But the company is also facing international demand from about 30 countries -- including Italy and Germany -- some of which are using Seegene's products on patients, Chun said.

At first, Seegene struggled to meet demand, but now it is coping. The firm is making about 10,000 kits a week and each kit can test 100 patients. So it is making enough to test one million patients each week, at a cost of under $20 per test.

https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/12/asia/cor ... index.html

[laklak]

Capitalism FTW!

[Brian Peacock]

That makes sense. So, how much faster has it spread here vs there vs anywhere, testing drive-thru style vs waiting for symptoms?

The virus has an infection rate of around 3.2 wherever you live.

Infection Rate (Wiki)

And generally only people who are symptomatic are tested.

[Sean Hayden]

But we need drive-thru testing!

--//--

Anyway, I think that makes sense. Stay home unless you're really sick.

How testing would have prevented this mess is less clear, but that is the claim some are making, especially those who also want to bring politics into this.

[L'Emmerdeur]

Ah, so why is screening for infection of any use in controlling an epidemic? I'm not an epidemiologist, so I'm not qualified to explain, but they seem to believe it's important. In The New York Times, we have a description of why a doctor feels it's urgent that she be provided with a test for her patient.

'As Deaths Mount, China Tries to Speed Up Coronavirus Testing'

Dr. Zhang Xiaochun, who works in a hospital in Wuhan, was in dismay. Her patient had been running a fever for nine days, and a CT scan showed signs of pneumonia — symptoms of the new coronavirus sweeping across the central Chinese city.

But a test to confirm the diagnosis would take at least two days. To Dr. Zhang, that meant a delay in isolating her patient — and getting potentially lifesaving treatment.

This past week, Dr. Zhang started a social media campaign with an urgent call to simplify screening for the new coronavirus. It was an unusually public effort that quickly found support among public health experts and the government as China grapples with one of the deadliest epidemics in its recent history.

“The purpose is to isolate and treat quickly,” Dr. Zhang said in a telephone interview. “It amounts to extraordinary measures taken in extraordinary times.”

The new coronavirus has sickened more than 40,000 people and killed more than 900 people in China. Hardest hit are the residents of the outbreak’s epicenter, Wuhan, and the surrounding province of Hubei. Hospitals are overwhelmed and medical supplies are scarce, leading to delays in treatment for thousands of people.

A major bottleneck has been a shortage of nucleic acid testing kits used to confirm the presence of the coronavirus. So Dr. Zhang proposed that doctors could first use CT scans to detect pneumonia and quickly isolate and treat patients who have it.

If infection spreads unchecked (by failure to implement measures like containment areas) the health infrastructure will be overwhelmed, and more people will die. If is at least slowed down so that the medical community can mostly handle the load, lives will be saved. So it seems to me, anyway.

[Sean Hayden]

It's hard to believe that in the middle of an outbreak doctors would require test before isolation. You'll be isolated here on the assumption you have it. If it is a numbers issue then some other measure is probably required and in place already , right? Something that would require testing as part of the package, maybe to move forward and monitor.

But that's not really what is being claimed here. No, we're being told that accepting the WHO tests could have prevented this outbreak. Italy is a special case because the virus got there early before testing...well, that's kind of the problem with viruses.

When did it get to the US?

[L'Emmerdeur]

It's hard to believe that in the middle of an outbreak doctors would require test before isolation. You'll be isolated here on the assumption you have it. If it is a numbers issue then some other measure is probably required and in place already , right? Something that would require testing as part of the package, maybe to move forward and monitor.

But that's not really what is being claimed here. No, we're being told that accepting the WHO tests could have prevented this outbreak. Italy is a special case because the virus got there early before testing...well, that's kind of the problem with viruses.

When did it get to the US?

OK, I read the article from Politico that you quoted upthread. Perhaps I missed where somebody is quoted saying that that they could have stopped the spread if they had the test, or that the WHO test could have prevented outbreak in the US. I credit that somebody said that, but I didn't see anybody in the source you quoted making that claim.